Province to build clusters with global competitiveness

Anhui province is trying to nurture more advanced manufacturing clusters with international competitiveness this year, now that its number of scaled industrial enterprises - each with a main annual business income topping 20 million yuan ($3.13 million) - has surpassed 20,000, ranking sixth in the country.

During the provincial legislative session in January, Governor Li Guoying made the proposal after the eastern Chinese province netted in a GDP at 2.75 trillion yuan last year, while witnessing a yearly growth of 8.8 percent in industrial output.

For advanced manufacturing, Li called for major breakthroughs in six areas - integrated circuits, new displays, intelligent voice, industrial robots, new-energy vehicles and high-performance new materials.

With Anhui's advantages, he said, it is also imperative to see more digital-economy industrial clusters in smart chips, smart terminals, e-commerce, big data, cloud computing, digital entrepreneurship and mobile communications.

Niu Nutao, director of Anhui Provincial Economic and Information Commission, said that the province will invest in more than 1,000 projects for technical upgrading this year and its technical innovation investment of 730 billion yuan can help the province usher in some 500 new products at the provincial level.

In addition to large enterprises, the province will also help small industrial firms, he said.

The ushering in of the first new-energy car from the joint venture between Anhui Jianghuai Automobile and Volkswagen Group, the SOL E20X, is one of the province's top priorities this year - dubbed the No 1 project for Anhui's advanced manufacturing.

According to Jochem Heizmann, president and CEO of Volkswagen Group China, the new JV is Volkswagen's third in China. When China's reform and opening-up started, Volkswagen was the first car manufacturer to set up local production, partnering first with SAIC and later with FAW.

"We are proud to have played a vital role in the development of China's automotive industry," he noted, adding that "in the light of electrification, we again are taking pioneering steps in the Chinese market to meet the needs of customers."

In Ma'anshan city, home of Magang (Group) Holding Co Ltd, or MA Steel, Mayor Zuo Jun vowed to concentrate on leveraging the city's unique advantages, adding that besides steel, it will also develop robots.

MA Steel, set up in 1958, is now an extra large-sized iron and steel complex in China with a staff of some 43,000 people, which netted a profit of 5.6 billion yuan last year from 19.71 million metric tons of crude steel.

Pei Yinghao from MA Steel said the group will try to make more silicon steel to meet the demand from drive motors in the new-energy automotive sector.

Meanwhile in Hefei, the listed iFLYTEK Co Ltd has become a national key software enterprise dedicated to intelligent speech and language technologies, software and chip product development, speech information services and integration of e-government systems.

Established in 1999, the company has seen its core technology - intelligent speech technology - rank top in the world.

As the mobile internet enters the voice era, iFLYTEK has launched the iFLYTEK Voice Cloud platform, the world's first platform providing intelligent speech interaction capabilities over the mobile internet.

(China Daily 05/24/2018 page18)